It seems that ProGrade Digital really isn’t messing around here. Early last month, they said they were going to skip XQD in favour of its next-generation replacement, CFexpress. Today, ProGrade Digital announces a new 1TB CFexpress card capable of transfer speeds up to a whopping 1.4GB/sec. Also announced today are three new 64GB, 128GB and 256GB UHS-II SDXC cards aimed at video shooters with write speeds up to 200MB/sec.

The largest XQD cards currently available is Sony’s 256GB XQD G Series card. ProGrade Digital’s new announcement absolutely hammers not only that card’s capacity, but also its transfer speed. With the Sony having read & write speeds of 440MB/sec and 400MB/sec respectively, it pales in comparison to the ProGrade Digital CFexpress with 1000MB/sec write and 1400MB/sec read speeds.

The CFexpress standard has been evolving for several years within the CompactFlash Association as a successor to both CFast™ and XQD™ formats. We are pleased to be working within the CFA and aside device manufacturers to bring to market this next generation removable storage standard.

Industry adoption of CFexpress will allow for much higher resolution and higher bit rate image capture than ever before in many still image and video capture devices. Faster offload speeds will also greatly benefit the post-capture workflow through the extremely high read speeds it provides.

– Wes Brewer, ProGrade Digital CEO

While CFexpress is technically a drop-in replacement for XQD, it will require that hardware manufacturers update their firmware to support it. So, if you’re shooting a Nikon DSLR or a video camera that currently uses XQD, you might have to wait a little while before you can utilise CFexpress.

There’s no word on cost yet, or exactly when the new card will be released, not that it really matters until there are devices out there to support it. But it is currently being demonstrated at NAB 2018 in Las Vegas this week.

Also announced today is a trio of new V90 SDXC cards for video shooters. Available in 64GB, 128GB and 256GB capacities, the cards are priced at $99.99, $189.99 and $379.99 respectively. Being designed specifically for video, the V90 spec requires a minimum sustained write speed of 90MB/sec. The cards offer a maximum write speed of up to 200MB/sec and a maximum read speed of up to 250MB/sec.

ProGrade Digital recommend these cards specifically for use with the Panasonic GH5S, Panasonic AU-EVA1, the Canon Cinema EOS line and the Canon 5D Mark IV – of course, they’ll work in other cameras, too. They’re optimised for 6K, 4K, UHD, Full HD, and will satisfy the needs of most current codecs.

There’s no word on a release date for the cards, yet. But the prices have been announced. The 64GB card will be $99.99, the 128GB card $189.99 and the 256GB card $379.99. Each comes with a 3 year warranty. No doubt they’ll pop up for pre-order at B&H when they’re ready. You can find out more on the ProGrade Digital website.

These cards will operate at slower speed of controller inside the camera. So in general not a good idea to spend on new memory cards unless the camera supports it to max.

Kaouthia

Or if you want to not spend all day pulling that footage off your card and onto your computer.

It’s not all about how fast the camera can write the data out (I mean, a codec’s only going to put out a certain amount of data regardless of how fast the camera can actually write), but pulling that data back off and onto your computer so you can work with it, yeah, that’s important. 🙂

Chaitanya

Generally speaking majority of people will be copying their photos onto hard drives(either one in PC or onto NAS) and even with RAID fastest write speeds they you can expect are around 150MB/s and in those cases it doesnt help having a high speed card.

Kaouthia

Most of the people I know dealing with cards of these sorts of sizes and speeds are copying to SSD for fast editing which is significantly faster than 150MB/sec.

Hello Pierre, I noticed your comment about speed with the Canon camera. Yes, the V90 SDXC cards are boosted to achieve faster performance rates. Please share with us if you do add a ProGrade Digital card to your workflow. We’d love to know if you perceive a difference.

Pierre Bisson Video (V90) tested and certified to perform at a minimum
sustained recording rate of 90MB/second. One of the main reason we made this card was to make sure it would handle the needs of the 5D Mk4.